A couple photos for you from a couple rows in two of our stockrooms at the new factory. Still a bit messy as we get things set up, but we're getting there.

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We just had to chuckle earlier today: we saw yet another typical anti-Asia comment, this time warning people not to buy any “safety” items from us, especially disc brakes. Before it was always, “don't buy anything,” but that obviously didn't work - witness the move to quadruple our factory space -, so now it's just “safety” products apparently.

It's funny but a bit sad how the anti-Asia sentiment amongst a few out there - almost only in the US for some reason - leads them to make embarrassing and even vulgar comments, especially when they or their friends are associated with shops that have never contributed a single product to the scootering world. To begin with, we import and resell many of the exact same “safety” products they do only we keep our markup low. Have to say something to compete, right? After that, are they simply trying to mislead people or do they truly not know that we manufacture the most popular Lambretta disc brake kit in the world (with our brand new Vespa disc brake kit coming up strong), continually re-ordered and sold by the top tuning shops in the world, who certainly know what they are doing, as well as being praised by endless scooterists as a tremendous safety addition?

Without doubt the the best thing I have ever bought for a scooter in 26 yrs (on and off). The first modification anyone should do in my opinion. Well made, good fit, etc, etc, in fact so good I have bought another for my GP.

Kit is complete, castings are good quality and the whole solution is well engineered.

It's been over 6 months now on my TS1 I'm totally pleased with it... I plan on a second purchase for my Imola LI150. It's great to get up and go, but it's pretty cool to be able to stop too.

Then of course there are our tubeless rims we manufacture for Lambretta and Vespa. We waited 40 years for someone else to invent them then went ahead and did it ourselves as a world first; as such they merited reviews and tests over 9 pages in 3 different issues of Scootering, perhaps a record, where they concluded that “They have proved to be very good quality. [...] The ScootRS wheels appear to be a major advance in safety for Lambretta owners.” As other have written:

I'm coming in to my second year now on these scootRS tubeless rims, covered some thousand odd miles, no problems as yet touch wood, feel a whole lot safer with these under me.

I've just used ScootRS rims for [riding to] Austria, 2,300+ miles up and down mountains, along motorways and hairpins and in all sorts of conditions/weather with no probs. Definitely recommend them to anyone.

One of my barrel fins went straight through my scootRS tubeless rim at high speed but still gave me time to get it under control and stop. If it was a tube I recon I would have lost it.

Those are only two of our items, but between those two alone we at scootRS in a very short time have probably contributed more to the safety of classic scooterists throughout the world than almost any other company out there. And the good part is we've done it while offering very reasonable prices.

Another good thing we do is continual improvement, always looking at our products and customer feedback to make changes over time as possible. Amongst those who know the least bit about management or manufacturing, this is a very good thing. The dire warnings, however, see this as evincing fault, as though all products - well, maybe only those from Asia - should enjoy immaculate conception, foretell every possible future permutation, and thus never be improved. Hence, if Sony comes out with a new PlayStation it therefore means the last one was bad and they “tested” it on you. Truly bizarre how sound, systematic improvement can be conflated with a willful lack of care, isn't it?

So, no doubt after a long day organizing the new factory you'll permit us to chuckle a little bit about the “safety” of believing everything you read on the internet. Best advice? Try our products and know for yourself. Ever a problem, simply contact us. Heck, we even have a guarantee, have you not read that somewhere?

We're moving! We've outgrown our location once again and are moving to much larger premises. We were maxed out at our old place. We needed both more room to work and more stockroom space. In the past we created some space by building raised stockrooms within the shop, but they were already stuffed to the gills. In the photo you can see the main room of the new scootRS factory where we are setting up and will have our machinery for manufacturing. At the far end it turns out into a big entrance, so great airflow, and very nice light throughout with the skylights above. Off to the right are various rooms for scooter assembly, polishing, offices, etc. There is also an upstairs area and an entire other 2-story building area for a large stock room and office. Hopefully enough room to keep expanding within for a while.

This does mean some slowdowns right now on production while we fix it up and get things going. Finished stock will ship as normal.

After working out a few kinks due to the server caching old deleted pages, we've got the new v.5 site design up and working.

To start you'll find a slick new menu with some nice functionality we spent quite a lot of time on. We coded it to open to and highlight your page or product section, as well as bring in parts subsections on the fly to cut down on load time and avoid having to click around.

Secondly, you'll see the scooter parts category pages have been redesigned and note a new “set stock” link at the top when viewing them. Be sure to try that and the new display mode options. (The first two involved some coding in the background to make sure they are faster.) If you use the “add-to-cart” icon, you'll see your items are whisked off in the background, as before, but with a little wink of acknowledgment. The bookmark icons work similarly.

What else? Oh, yes, the image viewers are new, and whereas we had one for single images and another for multiples, they've been combined and jazzed up a bit. Search was redone to let you order directly (we'll see how that one goes). The pages are all lighter now. -Well, we'll let you discover the rest. Enjoy. We've tested in IE6/Firefox2/Opera9, while others should work or degrade well. Any problems, please let us know.

Next comes our very own server and a new database system, both to avoid the timeouts you see here sometimes when things are busy.

Doing some clean-up at the shop. Here is the shopcam on the old cylinders we are throwing out for scrap metal, the stuff you'd typically get on one of those eBay specials. These are just the badly sleeved ones we found from stripping down scooters, not sure yet what we'll do with the ones that can be reused, if anything. Probably sell for scrap too. We only use new cylinders on our scooter restorations.

Speaking of shops, alleged shops, and the quality of work done in them, there's a new article entitled “The Pecking Order” written by someone who actually came to Vietnam and visited in person most every shop around (unlike people who have no idea but nonetheless issue generic warnings never to buy anything from Asia). He toured our shop, saw us manufacturing parts, inspected the scooters we were restoring and our huge stock of all new parts for our restos, and even our junk pile. No newbie - he learned the hard way before about completely bodged scooters from local shops here - he starts his article at the bottom describing the local shops, their poor quality, and the “bottom feeders” who claim they have huge shops in Vietnam but actually buy from local shop to flip on eBay. He finishes at the top of the “pecking order” and concludes the article with this sentence:

After spending an afternoon at ScootRS, I wanted to order one of their Lambrettas because of the quality of their shop (yes, an actual shop).

Ok, so we got sick of orange and changed the colors. We've now got that hip chocolate and light blue thing going. (If you see orange, hit shift-refresh.) It's not done yet, especially the category pages. There are some nice display changes coming, and also a new database system which should put an end to any timeouts when the site is busy. We probably have to wait to do all the changes together. (Well, to be honest, we altered so many pages on the local test site we can't remember which changes for what are where and would error without everything done.)

We should also mention we are very busy at the moment. If you're experiencing a delay getting your order, our apologies. Please note we were closed for two weeks for New Years here starting around the 12th, and presently have a TON of orders being processed. Literally: probably a ton.

So, it is New Years again here, in this, the Year of the Pig. Gifts have been received, large bonuses have been paid, dinners have been eaten, drinks have been drunk, offerings have been made, dragons have been danced under, pigs have paraded, and we are thus off for holidays until the 22nd. Happy New Year!